In order to improve efficiency in collecting garbage, municipalities have mounted trash compactors within the box of their automotive garbage trucks. These compactors include a powerful ram operated hydraulic press, carrying a large end panel. The press reduces the volume of collected refuse by compressing it against the rear flooring corner of the truck box. Such volume reduction increases the efficiency of resource allocations during garbage collection operations.
More particularly, these garbage truck boxes include a rear cavity enclosing a hopper, for loading refuse and for flattening it thereagainst. Thereafter, this load of flattened trash is moved forwardly into the box by displacing the hopper to a predetermined position where the hopper is then unloaded. A problem associated with such a known system is that trash tends to build up at the rear unloading area within the garbage truck box, to eventually clog same well before all the available inner loading space of the box is used. Indeed, there is no means to specifically distribute the flattened refuse evenly within the box, i.e. forwardly of the trash unloading area within the box.
Among the relevant art in the field of trash compactors, it is known to use two pairs of counterrotating shearing discs forming a V-shape wedge member, for crushing within the V-trough trash material. The large top mouth of these V-wedges is fed with trash under gravity, and is progressively crushed in a downward direction to eventually escape through a narrow channel at the bottom apex of the V-wedge. This is clearly shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,490,706 issued in 1970 to Rogers, as well as in U.S. Pat. No. 3,951,059 issued in 1976 to Drew-it corp. Furthermore, to prevent damage to the compacting machine, pressure relief means have been developed to temporarily release the bias directing the two pairs of crushing arms one toward the other, upon extremely hard uncrushable material engaging therein: see for instance U.S. Pat. No. 3,827,351 issued in 1974 to Ecology Recycling inc., and U.S. Pat. No. 4,069,929 issued in 1978 to Wisconsin Alumni Research inc.
However, these state of the art references have all the same drawbacks: they do not address the particular problem of distribution of the compacted refuse once it escapes from the compacting unit. The conventional trash compactors undesirably crush rather than flatten the trash material, particularly plastic bottles and metallic cans; volume reduction by flattening can be greater than through crushing. The compaction ratio still remains quite low-typically a 2:1 ratio (about 50% of initial volume), for a given power output of the compactor.